Monochrom/Noctilux - West Virginia freeway stop

So it seems not many people like this picture. But others have gone before documenting the suburban landscape. That's fine. I can like these pictures when they are part of a narrative, a series of photographs that show me something. Dale, what is it about this picture that plays into your other work?

BTW this image reminds me of my trips back and forth across the South. Cracker Barrel was a reliable road food stop. These days I'd use the Internet to look for something more local, but at the time it sufficed for nourishment after long days of driving.

The appeal for me is varied - I'm very much an urban creature, growing up in the innards of an industrial city. One of my favorite haunts out West is old downtown Hollywood, from LaBrea down to Vine at least. I'm also a very technical creature, preferring concrete, asphalt, and steel to meadows and wetlands. This urbanscape can be disappointing if you think of the banality and somewhat temporary nature of businesses popping up along busy freeways, but this time I saw beauty in the regular geometry of all the objects pictured, and the comfort it gives me as a constant traveler to know that so many businesses I trust for food and lodging are readily available along these routes I travel (interstates only). I've made about 30 solo trips from Akron to Los Angeles and back, the last dozen or so between 52 and 52-1/2 hours, and the freeway system and its supports are like gold in the bank to me.

The significance of black and white to this type of urban 'development' should be obvious. Growing up in an inner city that has snow and ice on the ground several months per year, all covered in black soot from the rubber factories from day 2 of any snowfall (and Spring to Fall scarcely better), black and white always seemed perfectly natural in those days, and I remember the first popular color camera prints looking rather peculiar. Going back to the West Virginia landscape here, it stands in extremely sharp contrast (in the warmer months at least) to the vast number and size of green hills along the WVa Turnpike. I don't see any of those dynamite'd hills from the freeway, probably a testimony to the prescience of WVa's PR department, and even this scene isn't something you can appreciate while on the freeway - you have to get off.

In essence, I see little if any difference between this and the image of dead trees in a wetlands I posted here recently, but that's just me....